by Potjeh » Sat Nov 10, 2012 7:24 am
Guys, at least show the common courtesy of reading the idea before rejecting it.
As stated in the original post, player activity would be the relevant variable rather than a simple body count. I listed consumption of resources, crafting of stuff and planting of field as examples of activity. But now that I think of it, pretty much every activity can be boiled down to consumption of resources, so we could just track that. So yeah, the examples of player numbers are given for average players. If you play efficiently 16 hours a day you'll be burning through a lot more resources, so you may raise as much light as a dozen casuals. There is the potential problem of botting easy resources to immediately consume them (chop log -> split -> study shaving), but I think that can be resolved with an invariance penalty (on an area level rather than per character, so alts aren't encouraged). Another thing that could potentially be used is various cultural events, such as holding masses and balls, but tbh I haven't played MMOs with these that much so I can't really tell if these things would be fun or just tedious.
I also never said that activity should be the only variable, it's supposed to be a compound measure of activity and building presence. The way I imagine it, the buildings would determine the potential light, and activity would fill up this potential. All buildings would raise the light, but not all equally. I can see a niche here for decorative constructions, like flower gardens, fountains, statues, mausoleums, fancy pavement etc. Anyway, the point is to avoid making light level determined by nothing but settlement age (because building spam just takes time), and to make it possible for ghost towns to return to darkness on their own. IMO getting the buildings should still be the harder part of pushing light, but this would definitely be a tricky thing to balance.
Having darkness as the preferred state and using churches solely for offensive purposes rubs me all kinds of wrong. We're supposed to be bringing the light of the Empire into the uncivilized corners of the world. I know, fluff is never a good reason on it's own, but I think that making darkness a bad thing and having a challenge of pushing it back would provide for more engaging gameplay than simply having the default state of the world be the best one.
As for turning bodies into assets, that's still thinking within the current social order. The idea here is to move away from small towns populated with a single tightly knit clan to big towns (I'm envisioning hundreds, or maybe even thousands of inhabitants if the servers can handle that) where recruitment is a lot more open, and there are multiple factions with different agendas in a single town (ie like RL towns).
